1. Field of the Art
The techniques and hardware arrangements described herein relate to a display detection system. In particular, the display detection system allows users of mobile devices to detect a display screen by capturing images of the display screen and view what is being displayed on the display screen on the mobile device.
2. Description of the Related Art
The mobile cameras equipped on most modern smartphones are increasingly used as a gateway for accessing information. For example, many smartphone applications use mobile cameras to scan Barcodes or QR codes. Several image visual search systems (e.g., Google Goggles™, Ricoh Occutag™, etc.) have been developed for landmark recognition and product recognition based on the images captured by mobile cameras.
There have been several related systems proposed in the literature. VR Code displays on the screen patterned information that is invisible to human but visible to special cameras so that the mobile device can recognize which screen it is looking at. Another system allows a user to retrieve presentation slides with camera captured images. TvTak is a mobile app that can recognize which TV program is shown by snapping a photo of the TV screen. According to the publicly available technical documents, the app tries to recognize one TV screen within the captured image based on the screen position and aspect ratio information, extracts the image/video fingerprints, and searches for the best match in the TV program database. Some mobile video retrieval systems can also support video search by snapping a photo of the video screen but the video database must be preprocessed before the search can be performed.
Additionally, existing videoconferencing systems collect and transmit data streams along with video and audio streams in a videoconference session. This is because in most business meetings, the users expect to not only see each other, but also to exchange data information, such as documents, presentation slides, handwritten comments, etc. These data streams are usually directly captured from computer screens, separately encoded with special coding tools, and displayed side-by-side with the video streams on a remote site.
The explosion of mobile devices drives more and more videoconferencing service providers to develop mobile applications such as smart phone and tablet applications. These mobile applications make it much easier for the users to access the videoconferencing service from anywhere using mobile devices.